Colonel Abdalhamid Zakaria, a doctor and defector from the Syrian army, appeared Monday on Amanpour and described the appalling conditions in the Aleppo military hospital where he worked until his defection, CNN reported.
Now a member of the Syrian Free Army, Col. Zakaria spoke from Istanbul, recalling how at Aleppo hospital he had treated Syrian soldiers, most of whom “were shot from behind when they refused to kill the civilians.”
As for the civilian patients, he said they were treated “only when the regime is looking for further investigations.” But if they had no information to divulge, “the regime will kill them directly by many ways.”
Among those lethal methods, he detailed “calcium injections, intravenously and rapidly causing cardiac arrest, or by using high doses of insulin causing hypoglycemic coma and finally death.”
He added, “Those who were injected are lucky, compared to those left bleeding to death in the dark.”
Aware of the seriousness of his accusations, Col. Zakaria insisted: “I have seen by my own eyes. The staff who injected those people are nurses and doctors who my friends.” Then he corrected himself: “They were my friends, not now.”